Masa Offers the Kernels of a Culture

Without the tortilla, there is no taco. And, as the Mexican saying goes: Sin maíz, no hay país.

Without corn, there is no country.

“Our people spent thousands of years growing corn, harvesting corn and making it into masa and tortillas every single day,” said Hugo Ortega, the Mexico City-born chef at Hugo’s restaurant in Houston. “It is truly in our bones.”

Much of the corn in Mexico is eaten in the form of masa, soft corn dough that is the base of the tortilla, the tamal, the gordita, the sope, the tlacoyo — the list seems endless. The fresh, earthy taste of masa is bigger than tacos; bigger, even, than Mexico.

“One of the only ways to define Latin American cooking, which covers such an enormous area, is with masa,” said Maricel Presilla, the author of “Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America.”

Corn is something Ms. Presilla has spent a great deal of time thinking about. Chocolate and chiles, potatoes and tomatoes and other foods native to Latin America have all been absorbed into global kitchens. But masa remains stubbornly, proudly Latin, the clay that molded the food traditions of a continent.

There are two distinct types of corn in Latin America: elote is sweet, tender corn that North Americans recognize as corn on the cob: maíz is hard, so-called flint corn that is dried after harvest and then ground into flour.

It is only when maíz is “nixtamalized” that the basis for a great taco — a great tortilla — is born.

In Mexico, masa for tortillas is always made from nixtamal, dried corn that has been treated with an alkali, like ash or slaked limestone (called cal in Mexico), that softens its texture and vastly improves its nutritional profile. Nixtamalization also changes the flavor and aroma of corn in ways that are addictive and indelible but almost impossible to describe.

Lesley Téllez, a writer in Elmhurst, Queens, who graduated from culinary school in Mexico City and now leads food tours there, said: “There’s a mineral aroma, from the volcanic-rock millstones used to grind the corn. The masa smells fresh and grainy, with none of the sourness or sweetness of packaged tortillas.”

Nixtamalizing has been documented as far back as 1500 B.C. and was traditionally a tedious process: soaking, draining, rinsing, peeling and grinding, all by hand. The same process is used to make hominy, the swollen white kernels that fill a bowl of pozole, and mote, whole kernels that are simmered and roasted all along the Andean highlands, from Ecuador to Chile.

Not coincidentally, Ms. Téllez lives near the only New York City tortilleria, or tortilla factory, that nixtamalizes and grinds its own corn. Tortilleria Nixtamal supplies masa and tortillas to most of New York’s top taquerias and restaurants: Dos Toros, the Fonda restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan and many more.

Still, last week she pulled out her Nixtamatic, a tabletop electric mill that she lugged home from Mexico, to make her own masa for tlacoyos — masa cakes, thicker than tortillas and with a pronounced corn flavor, stuffed with refried beans. She said it was the best batch she had ever made: airy, soft and light, made with red and white corn kernels she brought from Mexico. (Tortilleria Nixatamal uses corn grown in the United States. ) “When you smell fresh masa, you just want to bury your face in it,” she said.

Outside Mexico, the corn for masa is dried and peeled but not nixtamalized, making for a fluffy, mild dough. It is also ubiquitous across Latin America. In Guatemala’s ancient creation myth, humans were shaped from masa by the gods; today, Guatemalan cooks make masa-stuffed tamales colorados, ruddy with achiote oil.

Modern Salvadorans still, as a staple, eat pupusas, which are thick hand-shaped masa patties filled with cheese or refried beans or meat; Venezuelans and Colombians share arepas, fragrant buns that are irresistible slathered with butter and cheese or as an accompaniment to soups and stews, for soaking up the juices.

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Mixing, kneading, rolling and pressing: Maricel Presilla shows how to make tortillas.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

In the Caribbean, where corn arrived via the Spanish conquistadors, masa for tamales is sweetened with local sugar and studded with fruit. And in Mexico, the month of September, corn harvest time, is marked by tamales stuffed with a special masa of fresh, milky corn.

Throughout Latin America, Ms. Presilla said, working with masa is considered women’s work. It took a crew of women to keep the line moving at the Solber Pupusas stall at a science fair in Queens two weeks ago. (In 2011, Solber Pupusas won the coveted Vendy award, given to the city’s best food vendors.) The workers are known as pupuseras, said Cesar Fuentes, who owns Solber Pupusa with his mother, Reina Bermudez, and her husband, Rafael Solber. “Girls learn from their mothers, and they learned from their mothers.”

From huge plastic tubs, each pupusera knows how to snatch a chunk of dough, press it out into a round the size of her palm, then place a nut of filling in the center: quesillo, a soft cheese, or pork carnitas enriched with ground fried pork rinds, or both. Then, using the fingers of her other hand, she gently shapes the masa around the filling and brings all the edges together, a bit like making a Chinese soup dumpling. Last, she twirls any extra dough into a topknot, snaps it off and tosses it back in the tub, and pats the sealed pupusa into a patty, to be seared on a griddle until the filling is molten and the masa speckled with brown. For an expert, it all takes about 15 seconds.

“Working with masa is an art form,” Ms. Presilla said, inspecting the crepe-thin edge of a tortilla as it toasted on a heavy griddle in her kitchen in Weehawken, N.J. Ms. Presilla holds a doctorate in medieval history (and, on the side, runs two pan-Latin restaurants in New Jersey). Her vast cookbook, published last fall, is the first serious but accessible study of the traditional foods of Central and South America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean nations, including Cuba, where she was born.

Making tortillas is harder than it looks, she said. Unlike wheat flour, masa has no gluten to hold it together, and the starch in corn doesn’t grab onto water well. “It looks easy to make a tortilla, but there are so many things that go into it: controlling the heat, the moisture, even the amount of contact,” she said.

Mr. Ortega would agree. “Each tortilla has a face, you know,” he said. The side that lands first on the comal, or black cast-iron griddle used to cook the tortilla, is the face, and no matter how many times it’s flipped, the rhythms of cooking will leave their mark.

Can he tell which side of a tortilla is the face just by looking at it? “Of course,” he said, surprised by the question.

Mr. Ortega grew up on the streets of Mexico City, working as a shoeshine boy, helping to support his family of 10. But he always kept a few centavos to feed himself on the masa-based snacks the city is famous for: gorditas, panuchos, tlayudas.

His favorites were huaraches, which are thick ovals of blue corn masa about the size of a flip-flop (huarache means sandal), toasted on a comal, filled with beans and topped with cheese and salsa. But he grew to respect the meticulous care that goes into traditional Mexican staples like tortillas through his grandmother, who had a small farm in Puebla where the family sometimes lived.

Mr. Ortega’s path to success in Houston took him from undocumented worker to dishwasher to cook to chef. It is evidence of his single-mindedness that his restaurant has its own molino: a two-horsepower mill the size of a golf cart, complete with rubber belts and millstones, that he determinedly trucked up from Puebla. It is used to produce three different masas a day: dried blue, white and yellow corn. A new and bigger molino, which weighs about 1,000 pounds, is waiting at the border in an 18-wheel truck also loaded with dried chiles and Oaxacan spices for Mr. Ortega’s new seafood restaurant, Caracol.

Mr. Ortega says the slightly nubbly texture and intense flavor of tortillas made from fresh masa are worth the effort he puts into them. “When the corn particles are cooking,” he said, “it gives the tortilla a toasty taste, like popcorn.”

But from Mexico City to New York City, more and more tortillas today are made from harina, the fine dry flour that makes smooth masa and pliable tortillas but produces only a mild corn taste.

Unless you live near a tortilleria, this is the kind of tortilla that you will make at home. Ms. Presilla advises the use of a large comal (a cast-iron pancake griddle is fine) to produce hotter and cooler cooking surfaces; also, it lets you cook more than one tortilla at a time. Masa harina for tortillas is easy to buy; the biggest brand in the United States is Maseca. Mixing the dough is a tactile pleasure. (It’s better to err on the side of stickiness, because the masa will dry out as you work with it.)

The hard part is watching each tortilla like a newborn baby as it cooks, constantly gauging its skin tone and temperature, anticipating its needs and desires — a quasi-maternal skill that comes only with practice. (Perhaps this is why women have traditionally handled the task.)

“Sometimes you even have to tickle them,” said Ms. Presilla, gently tapping the top of a tortilla to encourage it to puff up. “They are completely alive.”